Peace and Myakka River Water Quality Summary 2002 - Southwest ...

1.0 INTRODUCTION1.1 BACKGROUNDDuring the 1980’s and 1990’s a number of federal, state and regional resourcemanagement programs designated the Charlotte Harbor watershed as a prioritymanagement area. Protection and enhancement of water quality for use by people andwildlife are fundamental goals of these watershed management efforts.In 1996 a watershed assessment report funded by the Southwest Florida WaterManagement District emphasized the important role that monitoring data play insupporting sound watershed management decisions, and recommended that morefrequent (e.g., biweekly or monthly) water quality monitoring be initiated at selectedsites in the Peace and Myakka River basins (Squires et al. 1996). Thatrecommendation, and concerns about the sufficiency of the information currentlyavailable on water quality conditions in the Charlotte Harbor watershed, motivated anumber of organizations to work cooperatively to implement the water quality monitoringand assessment project covered in this report.Using funds provided by the District and the Peace River/Manasota Regional WaterSupply Authority, and in-kind services provided by the Charlotte Harbor EnvironmentalCenter, the District, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and the City ofPunta Gorda, the cooperating organizations initiated a monthly water quality monitoringprogram at a number of stations in the Peace River watershed in October 1997. InOctober 1998 the program was expanded to include an additional station in the PeaceRiver watershed and a number of stations in the Myakka River basin. In order toprovide information on annual mass loadings of priority water quality constituents eachof these stations was co-located with an existing stream gaging station, wheremeasurements of stream flow are recorded on a continuous basis by the U.S.Geological Survey. (The locations of these USGS gaging stations, which for technicalreasons must be sited in the freshwater, non-tidal portions of a watershed, are shown inFig. 1 and summarized in Table 1 below.)To encourage timely analysis and dissemination of the water quality data collectedduring the initial years of the cooperative monitoring program, the Charlotte HarborNational Estuary Program provided funding for the preparation of three annual projectreports (CHEC 1999, 2000, 2001). To help readers interpret this information in thecontext of regional water quality trends, the initial reports also included analyses ofwater quality and streamflow trends occurring at selected stations in the Peace andMyakka River basins during the years 1970 through 1998.In addition to the watershed monitoring program, the District, as part of its SurfaceWater Improvement and Management (SWIM) program, also carried out a monitoringproject in Charlotte Harbor that included portions of the most downstream, tidallyinfluencedreaches of the Peace and Myakka rivers. (The locations of these stationsare shown in Fig. 18, below). The SWIM monitoring project began in January 1993 andwas ended in December 2000, in preparation for a multi-agency monitoring program1